For some reason it’s not straight-forward to create new credentials for an existing Service Principal account in Azure Active Directory using PowerShell.

I’m using PowerShell, because I’m not an Azure AD admin in my current organization, but as a developer, I am able to create and manage service principal accounts. This is extremely convenient, because we use them for automated deployments to Azure.

We started using Azure DevOps release management about a year ago, and thus I recently encountered the first credential expiration of a service principal that was used by Azure DevOps to deploy resources to Azure. This makes sense, because service principal credential lifetime defaults to one year.